Posts Tagged ‘problem’

I’ve done some tests last month together with Martin Beek over at Marvels Film, and read his latest post yesterday about recording from the GH2 HDMI port, and the problems (and workflow) you are faced with if you want to go that route. It looked pretty complicated at first sight and i imagine it confuses a lot of people, withholding them from buying a Ninja or KiPro recorder for their camera.

I have been tinkering with the installers and other files, and i have constructed a zip archive that contains everything you need (just a few files to install) including a ready-to-use setup including directory-structure and scripts. In fact, it’s nothing more now than just drop the zipfile in a harddisk location of your choice, unpack it, run a few automatic installers. Add footage & run!

The calling script is even multi-file aware, so it can do batch processing.

INSTRUCTIONS

Download and unpack this zip file (78 MB) on your Windows PC. Make life easy for yourself and put it in the root of your C drive.

Browse to the directory that has been created “GH2_AviSynth”

Browse to the directory “INSTALLERS”

Install in this order:

AviSynth

ffmpeg

ProResDecorderSetup (ignore any warnings)

QuickTimeInstaller (ignore any warnings)

PC Avid Codec

Go back to the GH2_AviSynth directory and browse to the PROCESSING directory

Dump a HDMI recorder ProRes .mov file here

Double-Click on the demo script (this is the original script from the DVXuser thread) “GH2_CHROMAFIX.avs and Notepad will open the file

Edit the name of the video file to match yours

Run! Do this by double clicking “process_all.bat”

ffMpeg will run in tandem with AviSynth to process your footage and reports any errors along the way (hopefully none)

The resulting processed file will be a DNxHD 4:2:2 file in a MOV wrapper, ready to import on both Mac and PC editors such as Premiere and FCP

Done!

Note: if you want to output an AVI file (if you edit on Windows), edit the process_all.bat file and remove this part:-vcodec dnxhd -b 175M or replace it with a reference to another codec, e.g. -vcodec huffyuv

I hope this all makes things a bit easier to understand and easier to work with.

I have been woken up by a text message from a desperate Martin Beek (@ Marvels Film), at around half past one in the morning a few days ago. His message was, that all of his testfootage shot in Belgium and Italy had been turned down by his customer because ALL the shots had micro-moire patterns in the hair of people. He was even thinking about selling all his DSLR equipment and giving it all up.

I’ve written such a filter before, as a part of a digital imaging system for testing c-mount lenses, to reduce chromatic abberiation. I’ve now revamped this methodology into a FCP plugin called the “Marvels DSLR Moire Filter”, as a tribute to Martin, who is now in seventh heaven for all day now and as happy as a monkey with seven tails.

I don’t want to bother you with the technical details and point you to my Plugins page (see top menu) to read more (and download) this little gem that i’m pretty pleased with myself.

The plugin is not specifically designed to work with the Canon cameras, but with any other DSLR video camera that uses the line skipping algorithm to reach it’s HD resolution. As far as i know, that’s all of them except for the Panasonic Lumix GH series.

To cut a long story short… If…

your footage is spoiled by red/blue streaks ad pixels in natural patterns and materials such as hair, grass, leaves and water…

Well?! What are you waiting for! It’s almost free… (if you consider the semi-obligatory donation of US$10 if you REALY like it)

PLEASE READ THE REMARKS SECTION ON THE PLUGIN PAGE ! This plugin is not specifically designed to battle aliasing problems and the resulting moire from regular patterns such as brick walls. I don’t say it won’t work, but there are other and maybe easier and better ways to prevent “roof and wall” moire.

Martin has helped writing this article and by the look of it he was in a good mood… ;-)